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Microsoft, "brain lateralization," and patent quality

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

In March 2008, Jon Dudas, Director of the USPTO, made a subtle jab at the IT folks, suggesting that they were accumulating a lot of perhaps "not so significant" patents. Microsoft, a member of the Coalition for Patent Fairness, has a recently published application which can serve as a poster child for this trend: Developing Software Components Based on Brain Lateralization , US published application 20080134132 (5 June 08), based on application 11/565495.

Yes, this is left-brain, right brain stuff. Paragraph 13 of the published application:

[0013]For example, the left brain tends to look at parts, while the right brain tends to look at wholes. The left brain is logical, sequential, rational, analytical, and objective. The right brain, on the other hand, is random, intuitive and holistic. The right brain is good at synthesizing, being subjective and processing relationship information.

The first claim of the '495 application states:

A method comprising:
identifying an opportunity associated with designing software;
providing an arbitrator/communicator who is to serve as an intermediary between an object/component driven element and a situation/scenario driven element composed of individual who are to use designed software;
assembling the object/component driven element, wherein said object/component driven element includes individuals who design software;
developing a metric associated with development of said software and against which design activities are to be measured;
seeding one of said elements with an idea associated with the metric; and
iteratively translating and communicating results from one element to another until the design process is terminated.

Yes, Lee and Hayes wrote the application.

The inventors include Vladimir Sadovsky and Rebecca A. Norlander.

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Of application fluffiness issues see

Coalition for Patent Fairness: do as I say, not as I do

Dudas, IBM's toilet queue patent, and patent quality

Can these fellows go back to Congress in 2009 and talk about "patent quality" with a straight face?

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Of left brain, right brain:

http://www.wtv-zone.com/bootsnana/Interesting/Illusion.html

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Of Nordlander, see also US Patent 6606711 - Object security boundaries.

Full post as published by IPBiz on June 08, 2008 (boomark / email).